Reevely: 'Renegade' Uber drivers snarl Lansdowne traffic

So many people are taking taxis and private buses to major events at Lansdowne Park that the city is struggling to find places for them to get in and out of vehicles without blocking traffic.

People taking taxis, Ubers or private shuttles put on by faraway bars account for almost 10 per cent of the attendees at Redblacks football games, according to figures from 2016 — which makes a big difference when Bank Street is packed tight.

It’s a whole category of traveller that wasn’t considered at all in the transportation plans when the city government and the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group redeveloped the dilapidated fairground in the Glebe to host a new football team and big outdoor concerts: attendees who arrive in some kind of private vehicle and leave in them afterward, but don’t park in the meantime.

Transportation was always a weak spot in the Lansdowne plan. The park is far from the Transitway and it has the Rideau Canal on two sides. Bank Street is a major city artery but at four lanes it’s still relatively narrow and it’s riddled with stop lights.

“It’s great that the worst-case scenarios for Lansdowne haven’t played out but it’s still very reliant on that very congested artery,” said Coun. David Chernushenko, who represents the area. He’s tried to be a Lansdowne skeptic without being a kneejerk naysayer. “Short of running a subway under Bank Street, there’s always going to be a point where you’re caught in that congestion.”

Getting a football or big-concert crowd of 25,000 people in and out of Lansdowne smoothly is a challenge. The city and OSEG discouraged driving to games by making parking expensive and inconvenient, warning constantly that it’s a terrible idea to drive because you’ll have nowhere to put your car. Please, please, please take OC Transpo, the city and OSEG said, or official shuttles from City Hall and parking lots at the R.A. Centre and Canada Post headquarters.

Even so, many of the intersections along Bank get more traffic than they can handle on game days — they’re on the brink even at normal rush hours — and get pushed into official “failure” by traffic-engineering standards. The whole transportation system around Lansdowne is delicate.

Taxi drivers generally follow rules about where they can stop. Private shuttles carrying groups from Cornwall or Rockland are also not a big deal, with drivers who are usually very obedient.

“We’ve been able to track down who they are and what they’re doing and propose places where they can do that and be least in the way. There’s no value to the city in being an obstacle to people taking a bus,” Chernushenko said.

But Uber drivers — with no official bosses to contact, no easy way of getting them a message unless a police officer is right there — are tougher cases.

“They’re not labelled like a taxi and they’re doing some very renegade things. They’re blocking the flow of buses. They pull over wherever, because their customers have asked them to, and they pick people up wherever they’re ordered, even if it’s illegal,” Chernushenko said. “If it’s far enough out of the way, no problem. But if it’s getting in the way of the flow in and out of the underground lot or getting in the way of the buses and shuttles, that’s something we’re going to have to grapple with.”

Some good news: Slightly fewer people than expected are driving to Lansdowne and either parking in the underground garage or on the side streets in the Glebe or Old Ottawa South.

On the other hand, the official shuttles have been only been so-so. In 2015, OSEG rented 1,900 parking spots at those two southern lots but found only 700 of them filled.

The city and OSEG think that’s because more people took OC Transpo from more distant suburban park-and-rides than expected, instead of driving most of the way in from Barrhaven or Kanata and then switching. So the combined transit-and-official-shuttle numbers have matched the predictions pretty well even if the balance between the two is different: 54 per cent of attendees at Redblacks games last year took one or the other, just barely shy of the 55 per cent expected.

The bad news: Lansdowne has also missed its pretty low targets for people walking or biking to games. Those numbers aren’t terrible — about 10 per cent of attendees are getting to Redblacks games on foot or by pedal power instead of 13 per cent — but the goals were never that ambitious and they’re still beyond reach.

Overall, though, the Lansdowne transportation situation is good enough now that city council’s transportation committee will be asked to dissolve the special group that’s been monitoring the situation since the park reopened, a decision Chernushenko supports. What problems remain can be dealt with on the fly, the city believes.

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